george lucas

The great George Lucas does not care about your needs, simple fan; he wants only to deliver the plot.

When discussing being approached about Star Wars VII, Lucas revealed that the team behind the film saw his stories, but scrapped them in favor of something that might actually please movie-goers:

They looked at the stories and they said 'we want to make something for the fans,' so I said 'all I wanted to do was tell a story-- what happened, you know, it started here and went there. It's all about generations and issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers; it's a family soap opera.'

If Lucas' focus on plot getting from a to b and generational soap opera issues doesn't clue you in to why there was a serious lack of meaningful development in the prequels, I don't know what will. Thank you for the Star Wars universe, George, but maybe your departure was for the best.

P.S. If you haven't yet heard the way Lucas describes his "breakup" with the series, this is worth a watch. As much as we all give him grief for the prequels, letting go seems like a really painful process, and he deserves a lot of credit for being so graceful about it.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, George Lucas waxed poetic about the painful experience of letting go of Star Wars, and the lengths he's had to go to over the years in order to spare himself the vitriol of Star Wars fans. Apparently, "Lucas says he has assiduously avoided the Internet since 2000 — no Facebook, no Twitter, no e-mail even," which I guess means he's been lucky enough to never have to witness a debate about who shot first on someone's Facebook wall.

Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.

Han Solo may be a stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, but the man's got a code. Luckily for Lucas, he won't be online to read the responses to that argument.

Me, Natalie Portman, and George's kids—we were at Wembley arena at Michael Jackson's concert. We were taken backstage and we met Michael. There was Michael and Lisa Marie [Presley]. George introduced me as "Jar Jar" and I was like, That's kind of weird. Michael was like, "Oh. OK." I thought, What is going on?

Really though, would you expect a conversation with the King of Pop to be anything less than super weird?

Best continues:

After Michael had driven off, we all go back up to a big afterparty. I'm having a drink with George and I said, "Why did you introduce me as Jar Jar?" He said, "Well, Michael wanted to do the part but he wanted to do it in prosthetics and makeup like 'Thriller.'" George wanted to do it in CGI. My guess is ultimately Michael Jackson would have been bigger than the movie, and I don't think he wanted that.

If you need help imagining it, it might look a little something like this:

Best himself seems to have come to terms with his history as a character that has met with so much public hatred.

At the end of the day it is the movie business, and if the character doesn't work for the people who watch the movie then the character doesn't work. I can't take that personally. It's up to the filmmaker to make sure that not only does the film work for the filmmaker but it also works for the audience. So, because he wasn't fan favorite, I can understand why he was scaled back. And, narratively, they moved on to something else.

You can read the full interview, and some of Best's thoughts on Oscars for motion capture actors, here.

Called Strange Magic, the film stars Alan Cumming, Evan Rachel Wood, Kristin Chenowith, and Maya Rudolph, and is to be released on January 23, 2015.

From the press release:

"Strange Magic," a new animated film from Lucasfilm Ltd., will be released by Touchstone Pictures on January 23, 2015. "Strange Magic" is a madcap fairy tale musical inspired by "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Popular songs from the past six decades help tell the tale of a colorful cast of goblins, elves, fairies and imps, and their hilarious misadventures sparked by the battle over a powerful potion. Lucasfilm Animation Singapore and Industrial Light & Magic, which created the CGI animation for 2011's Academy Award®-winning film "Rango," bring to life the fanciful forest turned upside down with world-class animation and visual effects.

The Star Wars fans react to Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm with biting commentaries aimed at George Lucas, who is now the second largest shareholder of the Walt Disney Company after the estate of Steve Jobs.

For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next. It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.

I'm confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come.

Star Wars creator George Lucas has been trying for years to convert a large parcel of land in Marin County, CA, into a 300,000-square-foot movie studio, with amenities including a day care center, restaurants, a gym and a parking garage, only to be shot down by his wealthy neighbors.

Because the local homeowners' association has refused to let Lucas move forward with the studio, he's decided to put the land to good use by transforming it into low-income housing, simultaneously doing a good deed and trolling his fellow landowners.

"If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit," Lucas snarked.

He's even donating the various studies and surveys he paid for while working on the movie studio project, to help the new housing development get underway more quickly.